Where is your business losing money that nobody has written down?

Every cost in your books has been looked at by somebody. Rent was negotiated. Salaries were considered. The electricity bill gets a comment every month.

The money that leaves without a document is the money nobody examines.

Four that are usually present

Work done and not billed. The extra visit, the additional quantity, the change the customer asked for on the phone. Each one is small and reasonable and nobody raised a bill for it, because raising a bill for it felt awkward.

Money collected late. Not bad debt. Just slow. Every month that your own money sits with a customer is a month you funded his business instead of yours, and in a business running on a limit, that has a precise and unpleasant cost.

Rework. Something made or done twice because the information was wrong the first time. The second time costs full price in material and hours, and appears in no report as a loss.

Discount given to close. Perfectly sensible each time. Add up a year of it as a percentage of turnover and most owners are startled, because nobody has ever added it up.

Why none of this gets attention

Because each is invisible on its own and none of them has an owner. No single person is responsible for unbilled extras or for average collection days, so no single person reports on them.

Pick one. Measure it for a month, roughly. That is enough, because the first honest number almost always makes the decision obvious.

Of those four, which one would you guess is costing you most? Now check whether you are right.

Putting a number on one of those four, for the first time, is a short piece of work that usually pays for itself immediately. Tell us which one you suspect and we will help you measure it.